Confronting the Crisis of Global GovernanceReport of the Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance
15 June 2015

Executive Summary

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Strengthen the Responsibility to Prevent, Protect, and Rebuild: invest in early-warning capabilities and Responsibility to Protect (R2P) action plans for an approach to atrocities prevention that involves all UN agencies and programs; embed UN mission monitors in all forces participating in R2P implementation; and set concrete, achievable goals for all international actors seeking to prevent, react to, and rebuild after mass atrocities.

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4.2 Current Responses

International tools and techniques to meet the challenges of fragility and violence include conflict prevention, the participation of women in conflict resolution and peacebuilding, the norm of Responsibility to Protect (and Prevent and Rebuild), peace and stability operations, post-conflict peacebuilding (especially to strengthen rule of law and both state and society resilience), building respect for human rights, and a range of transitional justice measures, from formal trials to community reintegration.

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7.1.1 Political Will Matters

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Garnering and sustaining political support is central to advancing global policy and institutional reforms. Within the UN political context, reform proposals that threaten the interests of major powers, of standing coalitions of Member States, and the bureaucratic interests of major departments or agencies rarely prevail if change proponents fail to mobilize pressure against such powerful stakeholders’ resistance. Perennial efforts to reform the Security Council have faced such obstacles. Despite increased interest over the past two decades in UNSC reform by the broader UN membership, permanent members China, Russia, and the United States (all wielding veto 78 authority) appear skeptical of change. Recent Member State negotiations have lacked the robust commitment to reform normally signaled by active give-and-take diplomacy.159 Nevertheless, with a carefully calibrated reform package (as laid out in Section 7.3) tied to the historic occasion of the UN’s seventieth anniversary in 2015 and seventy-fifth anniversary in 2020, we believe political momentum can be renewed. At the same time, great power consent is not always a prerequisite for change, as the entry into force of the Land Mine Treaty in 1999, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2002, and the rise of the Responsibility to Protect as a global norm attest.

7.3.2. Reform of the UN Security Council

Learning from failures to reform the Security Council over the past two decades, the Commission recommends three realistic proposals it believes meet the twin goals of enhanced effectiveness and acceptability to the widest possible range of Member States.

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7.3.2.1 Improve the Working Methods

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138. Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity

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Build Smart Coalitions to Mobilize Support and Sustain Reforms

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Inevitable setbacks in both building international political traction for a particular reform and facilitating implementation are prepared for through a dynamic and flexible multi-stakeholder coordination mechanism.

Since the end of the Cold War, smart coalitions of like-minded states and nonstate actors have proven critical to achieving global governance reform whether through norm diffusion, policy innovation, or creation of a new global institution. For instance, the norms of human security and the Responsibility to Protect have each benefited, over the past two decades, from strong proponents within governments, civil society, and the business community. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, successfully teaming up with Canada and other governments to secure widespread support for the Mine Ban Treaty. And within less than a decade of its formation, a diverse coalition of CSOs and countries from the Global South and North brought about the previously unimaginable entry into force of the Rome Statute for an International Criminal Court.